Few authors are as skilled as Steve Berry in blending history with contemporary political intrigue, espionage, and page-turning thrills.

Berry brings back series hero Cotton Malone in his new thriller “The King’s Deception.” Malone is tasked with returning a teenage fugitive back to England, as a favor to his former boss at the Justice Department. Since it seems to be a low-octane assignment, Malone brings his own teenage son along, with plans to continue on to Malone’s European home.

But fresh off the flight in London the trouble begins, and before we know what hit us, Malone is in the thick of a high-stakes diplomatic showdown that involves a centuries-old secret that could change the world.

Nearing her death, 89-year-old Lilly Dunne is trying to make sense of her life, her loves, and her adopted country, in Sebastian Barry‘s fifth novel “On Canaan’s Side.”

As she tells it, Lilly fled to America from her native Ireland at the end of the first world war, and over the nearly seven decades that followed, she watched as the events of the twentieth century took the men she loved — brother, husband, son, and finally and heartbreakingly, her grandson.

Listen to Sebastian Barry

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A young Irish-American priest from Connecticut is sent to Ireland after World War One, to help him recover from what they then called “shell shock.” Father Robert Shannon plans to seek out his Irish ancestors, relax, and find his bearings again. But he arrives just as Ireland is sinking into civil war. And that’s not all of his trouble, as we find out in Frank Delaney‘s novel “Shannon.”

Listen to Frank Delaney

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